DISCLAIMER
This hand guide gives some quick tips about how this blog is meant to work. It might be useful for who needs some first guiding lines. Feel free to eventually skip it and wander all through the blog as you wish.
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FIRST STEPS | Brief introduction to wandering Walkscapes for Secaucus
The Walkscapes for Secaucus blog, although starts a specific design proposal for a specific geographical place, is rather a research on communicability and inclusivity in urban design. The main task is trying to understand how design process itself can implement inclusive tools and media. This contingent choice that doesn’t pretend to give an exhaustive answer to this topic, neither to suggests blogging as the ultimate media for this purpose.
MAIN ASSUMPTIONS | The trigger of this work, in first place, is to deal with a certain rhetoric embedded in urban practise. In the latter years debates and topics around urbanism are more and more engaging participativeness and inclusiveness in projects and proposals by thinkers, planners and designers. It appears quite paradoxical this doesn’t happen within the creative process as well. It has to be said, of course, this assumption yet keeps in mind of any precedent attempt in this track. But still the impression is transdisciplinar communicativity in urban practise needs a deeper understanding. This project, in this framework, wants to be a starting point for a personal (no less shared) research around this topic.
A second trigger is related to environmental debate within urban design, and the complexity of the relations among what are generally called ‘anthropic’ and ‘natural’ environments. This duality here is meant to be argued. If it exists in expressive terms, it doesn’t as an actual concept. Even if it does, the relationships occurring between the two has to be dialectic, that is to say ‘anthropic’ and ‘natural’ delineation is not completely fit to describe the complexity of an environment. This statement, still somehow not yet mature and defined, is supposed to be provocative in a positively and propositive way, rather than being a defeatist critique.
FRAMEWORK | With these premises, in this project it has been implemented part of the vocabulary and the mind set proposed by the Stalker Movement, and consequently the Walkscapes envisioning becomes a strategic framework to be used.
Before the invention of architecture, men had a symbolic tool with which shape space: the practise of walking – [F. Careri]
Walking is put as a main carrier of meainings all trough the project, as esthetic tool of urban investigation and urban practise. The metaphor of the stalker identifies the walker through landscapes (whether designer of the future or user of the present) as steward, custodian, guide and even performer (term loaded with its whole artistic and creative meaning) for, to and within the territory.
DESIGN SCOPES | The given framework of walkscape, in terms of space for walking, would expand itself in inclusive accessibility to the territory, and inclusive communicability of the landscape. By the way this project states the first spinal of this practise, that is proposal for walkable spaces leading to both psychological and environmental resiliency implementation in neglected and over-exploited urban spaces. In the design process it embodies itself in infrastructural intervention and reorganization in Secaucus, NJ.
DESIGN COMMUNICABILITY | This blog is organized in different sections:
DERIVE MINDSET | A sort of manifesto of the whole process. Taking from personal thoughts and accademic research (mainly referring to the concept of walkscape) a framework of different but dialectically collaborating topics is being developed. Each of the derives collected in this section gathers both of the two aspects in a narrative, taking the form of a journal where the story telling invites the reader to establish an involvement and to take a critic statement, whether positive or negative. From these derives it comes a sort of manifesto, whose purpose is to metabolize the informations and the suggestions into an operational agenda leading the design process, included in the main page of the section.
Although the declarative character, inherent to any kind of manifesto or agenda, it has a structure open to implementations and evolutions. This comes thanks to the format of the blog, where comments and feedback give the chance for debates and discussions. In this frame the eventual weak points intentionally put on discussion, embody inclusive gaps where the debate can enter and establish dialectics among blogger (designer) and reader (community).
VISUAL DERIVE | A fil rouge binds the included sequences of pictures. A sort of inherent narrative is suggested, rather than imposed. The suggestion lies in the short caption of each narrative, but at the same time the intentional absence of any descriptive text gives space for personal new interpretations by the reader, who is able to develop and propose any further red thread. The aim is to start a debate about shared imagery around the landscape. For this purpose using photograph is an example rather than a choice. The most immediate and intelligible, but not the only one. Any other media (such us paintings, graphic novels, video footages) would give, even on the same object, different suggestions and informations, in a way to empower the development of a more shared imagery for the place.
OPERATIVE DERIVE | It collects the actual design proposals. The sections are meant to clarify the operativity of the interventions embodied by the design. In a way this would be the less participatory phase, because here would be the main phase where the personality of the blogger (that is designer as well) comes up shaping precise ideas from the thoughts gathered before. The Visual Statements are thematized in a way some overlaps might be occurring, for they don’t embody a project yet, but a progressive process that would eventually achieve some results. These are not described as final, but rather ‘milestones’ of a continuous costant and yet not linear design narrative, just like the stops for breath along the wanderings. These milestones are ideally moments (occuring outside the blog, in the usual and traditional review dynamics for urban practise), when designer takes his time to review his work and to make statement on what is about to come, rather than to fix what has already been. Anyway this events would be implemented in latter times in the form of reports within the Operative Derive.
SKETCHBOOK | Sharing the whole sketchbook is a further way to make the design process inclusive. Some thoughts, suggestions or ideas gathered in a single note would be kept away from the published material. Some others would be completely reshaped in different forms. Still others would be meant to stay in the notebook, for divertissement out of habit. The reader would take simple enjoyment, out of any habit as well, of them, but perhaps would see them with different eyes, proposing to engage them back on the discussion table.
WALKSCAPES FOR SECAUCUS 
It’s an interesting topic, especially the original methodological approach with regard to the case study of Secaucus, as it represents a reference model for urban and regional analysis in a small-scale.
One of the architect Luigi Snozzi’s aphorisms says “the architecture is measured by the eye and the step” for which the observation and understanding of spatial quality is undoubtedly more articulated as the result of multiple points of view, clearly differents from those ones obtained by any means of transport.
Furthermore the present world has increasingly frenetic rhythms and road infrastructure is a no-place by definition, the no man’s land where all cross each other but the interpersonal relationship does not exist, because of speed.
In this sense, slow down and take back the human dimension of space (rather than mechanical) means transforming a no-place to place, a space of social aggregation where it must be first of all understood by direct observation.
In my opinion, the work can be helpful to all those who wish to get closer on this approach, and provides an excellent organizational model for designing the urban.